North County dialogue

Letters to the editor from North County readers, for March 23, 2014

S.D. Opera’s outreach efforts questioned

After the news about the imminent demise of the San Diego Opera, I feel it is my responsibility to respond as a professional musician and a San Diego County native.

I was born and raised in Carlsbad and attended Carlsbad High. I participated at an early age in local theater and musical ensembles of San Diego.

I attended The Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music in New York City, and also have been a Young Artist at the San Francisco Opera as an Adler Fellow and Lindemann Young Artist at The Metropolitan Opera.

I have never been asked to do a fundraiser or share the opera with the community, etc. I have always wondered why I never heard about the San Diego Opera while growing up in Carlsbad, but I heard plenty about the Los Angeles Opera. Can anyone explain that? I was exposed to La Jolla Playhouse, and The Old Globe, but San Diego Opera? Natives always have vested interest in their communities, even if they move away. They are willing to support. They just need to be asked.

Fundraisers for the opera need to reach out to the community. They will be surprised how much they will get in return. Singers and musicians donating their time and ability to help our art form and companies survive.

Renee L. Tatum

New York

Fiscal mistakes caused club’s failure

The March 18 article on a proposed soccer academy in Oceanside, reports Oceanside Councilman Jerry Kern Stern referencing the Escondido Country Club’s failure due to golf losing popularity.

The loss of interest in golf has nothing to do with the current circumstances surrounding the Escondido Country Club. The property was designated a golf course with public amenities since its opening in 1965. The current battle of property rights might have been avoided if the previous owner, La Jolla Development Group, had been more circumspect with its debt position. Bankruptcy filings show the country club managed a five-figure monthly profit before the current owner took over. Lack of fiscal prudence caused the club’s current circumstances, not loss of interest in golf.

Mary Coffey

Escondido

Animal experiments, treatment of orcas

As a doctor, I agree with PETA that animal experiments are not only cruel and morally indefensible, but largely irrelevant or even dangerous to human health. Animals’ physiology differs significantly from that of humans, and substances that benefit one species are often useless or fatal to another. The FDA reports that 90 percent of drugs that pass animal tests fail in humans, and the few that are approved often need to be relabeled or pulled from the market after they sickened or killed human patients. There are now better ways to do science than intentionally sickening and injuring animals.

Regardless of one’s opinion on animal experimentation, anyone with a fully functioning heart can agree that it’s indefensible to confine intelligent mammals, which, in the wild, would swim 100 miles a day to tiny, barren tanks. Captivity is so stressful for orcas that they gnaw at the iron bars and concrete of their tanks, sometimes breaking their teeth. SeaWorld destroys their intricate social bonds, by separating mothers from their babies and forcing incompatible animals to share the same cramped space, which often results in bloody attacks. It’s no wonder orcas in captivity die decades short of their wild cousins’ life spans.

It doesn’t take a degree in medicine to recognize that what SeaWorld does to animals is, quite simply, sick.

James H. Yahr, M.D.

Carlsbad

Top state officials save their jobs

The U-T editorial “Creating jobs: Rhetoric vs. reality” (March 17) was well done, after the first sentence. It should have read:

For years, the most powerful people in California government have set about creating and preserving their jobs as their top priority.

Hal Overton

Escondido

Weighing reality in student loans

Just like the home-loan bubble, student-loan borrowers are often making decisions that involve emotion more than financial logic. All parents want their kids to “do what makes them happy,” right?

The problem is, just like the mortgage crises, we have financially unsophisticated borrowers (students) being encouraged to borrow money by banks, which profit from that lending and are backstopped by the U.S. taxpayers against losses that result from their risky decisions.

Just as with mortgages, the solution would be to require the banks to keep more “skin in the game.” Having more to lose would give them the incentive to make better loans. Combine this with an ongoing government program to determine how many students end up in careers that use that degree — and how much they make — and we’d give banks and parents a way to assess the true value of a given degree. With that, both could make the loan decision based on objective facts.

Does that mean it might be more difficult to major in European art history than computer science? Yup, but that reflects reality in the job market, which ultimately ties directly to ability to repay those loans.

Todd Maddison

Oceanside

‘Peak hours’ squeeze SDGE consumers

For years SDG&E has told us that we must help to prevent power outages by using less power between 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. daily in periods of peak use.

Now that it wants to change the rate structure, it says the period of peak use is 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. and semi-peak use is 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 9 p.m. to midnight, and it is extending this period into the weekends.

SDG&E is making it impossible for most people to do any of their household chores at the lowest rates, To take advantage of the lowest rates, you will need to run all your household appliances from midnight to 6 a.m.

In addition, it is making the use of home solar systems, which are helping the utility meet its government requirements for green energy, less desirable because SDG&E is not going to reimburse home solar for overproduction at the higher rate since the peak rate period is not during peak solar producing hours. Once again it is shifting the cost of energy to those people who have tried to reduce their energy footprint by installing solar on their home.

SDG&E readily admits overcharging these ratepayers and now is claiming that it is leveling the field. How is that possible when SDG&E is changing its definition of peak hours. It is hard to believe that peak hours extend to 9 p.m. when most manufacturing plants and many other businesses are closed. I would hope that some adjustments are made to its proposal so that people will be able to use their appliances in the evening without incurring higher charges.

Norma Wochna

Oceanside

U-T San Diego encourages community dialogue on important public matters and welcomes letters to the editor. All letters are subject to editing. Letters must include a full name, community of residence and a daytime phone number. The phone number will not be published. The letters should be about 130 words. Writers can appear in print as frequently as once a month. Email your letter on North County subjects to letters@utsandiego.com.